Glorious unemployment

It is autumn and I'm happily unemployed. For now, I'm holding the time bandits at bay and have moments to get almost all the things I want to do in a day. I've planted some starts and seeds in the backyard and am anxiously awaiting their debutante parties. I am exercising this neglected physical self again and giving over to the pleasure of many cups of coffee with my lover after languid mornings of not-having-to-be-up-quite yet.

Roof cat

Far from post-coital I am lying in bed with my boyfriend in the early evening. Our pants are on, we are horizontal with the accumulated weight of the world. I’m under the covers; it’s cold in California in early fall but the warmth and the softness is good, it’s all right for right now.

He shows me the cat on the neighbor’s roof, a roof cat. Never seen it on the street or on the sidewalk.

Lost in noodle nation

I’m lost and you’re not coming in so clear these days, having a big old crisis of the identity everywhere you look. Not quite confident enough to be someone looked for.

With much of lives and love built around a tool that is still mostly used for the purveying of pornography, we become a nation of backaches and strained eyes. Noodle me this lover, noodle me a whole nation at sunset

Is this how I always look at parties?

So this is what 8 hours a day feels like

Squash blossom cephalopod
I got you in my feelers

4th of July

earthpig and ratmonkey on tour in bolinas

Earthpig and Ratmonkey

"So I guess you'll have to marry the Ratmonkey,” Stevo said with resignation in his voice.” As with anything concerning me, this blog would not be complete without the frame of reference my rat friend provides. Ratmonkey and Earthpig, two great friends and explorers. Moonwatchers and shuffle race champions. Helen and I found one another and talked all through a night and into the next morning over eight
years ago. We drove my little VW pickup to see the sun rise on a hill in Soquel and it looked like a dancing egg so we danced along to the slow dawn and knew without thinking that we would find a lot of sunrises together. Last weekend we ran into an old friend in Aptos Natural Foods, and were pleased with how we seemed. There was no need for him to ask if we still saw each other.

The shuffle

End of this month and time to shuffle my things once again. Moving into a real house where I'm going to commit to being in one place for one year and pay a deposit and loll around on clean vintage couches and stretch on gleaming hardwood floors. There is a garden and there are bulk grains to share and a casual dinner making rotation. Step one to being a real person is a real place to live. Looking for real life all the time, and ready for a closet/bed/kitchen/garden. What luxuries. Although I do hate the moving shuffle because it reminds me how ornery I'm getting in my old age.

Take chai?

Tea heavy with cardamom, milk and honey. It is summertime in Oakland, and this neighborhood is covered in roses that bloom in exaggeration of themselves. I'm selling blueberries for a living again, loading up the little rabbit with all the business of the farmers' market and entertaining visions of blueberry fairies for children and their parents.

Warehouse

This time it’s a warehouse in East Oakland. Between the BART train and the cargo train, there are old tracks as a physical memory of how this place used to turn out steam trains and they run right through my kitchen. This time I knew from the beginning I couldn’t make it work, that seven blocks from the BART at midnight was too many and too deserted for me and my handbag to be walking. I knew that the roads would yield too many flat tires for my bike and found the kitchen’s as dirty as the house I escaped in January. I am filled with tears three nights in a row breaking at the same time, falling into bed with my lover who asks me what is wrong and knows at the same time and a refrain that does not please me, “Is there something I can do for you?”

I want, desperately, I say, to live with Travis and Sunshine and it is light at the end of the tunnel possible and now it is established, we will move at the end of the month. It is a year commitment that I am more than ready to commit to it is a year of settling that I am looking forward to. I want to have a garden where I get to see plants I planted grow.

China

4 March 2008

You are in China, and it is obvious from the very border, exploding with the industrious mega-growth gripping a nation which is unfathomably big. 15-story buildings at every moment of construction. The border officials ask you if you speak Chinese with an air of expectancy. The rifle through passports as if they were in some way suspect, you suppress a cough and surreptitiously wipe snot away from your nose - you have already lied on the questionnaire about your proximity to birds in Northern Laos and whether you are suffering from these symptoms. Eventually you are stamped with the first of the extraordinary red ink and waved back on the city bus, minus the two Russians who had been the only other Western travelers on your bus from Oudomxay, Laos.

The immediate and overwhelming changes in the landscape are dominated by sweeping vistas and scale of agriculture, both enormous and impressive. The road is much better and superhighway is in the works across the way. A man will slide into the seat next to you for a very brief while, but still long enough to smoke 5 cigarettes.

Out the window young women are wearing fake Gucci hot pants and boots, rhinestones sparkling. They walk arm in arm past tractor-engine wooden carts piled high with yellow watermelons. Everything is in Chinese, except irrelevant and strange translations on advertising banners.

The landscape grows more spectacular, lush above the Mekong River. It is dark on arrival to Jinghong, which is first announced by a neon-lit bridge - lights running up and down the towers, a rainbow spectrum on the sides. Unlike the previous week spent in the isolated village of Muang Noi, the lights will not shut off at 9:00 pm with a sputtering of the generator. You are already certain the China will offer itself as the most psychedelic of countries on your trip to Asia.

Off the bus and bags dumped unceremoniously into a white hotel room you are half-starved and looking for the first real meal of the day after 7:30 am sandwiches at the bus station. Turn left on a cutty alleyway and look inside to see a a young girl being instructed in a traditional flute with a gourd as its base. To the right is a stadium with lights fully blasting and heading back to the main road when 2 loud explosions ring out. You drop and grab your lover as if in reaction to gun shots. It is a moment before realizing it is the beginning of an intense display of fireworks directly overhead. Professional pyrotechnics detonate very close to the surface of the ground and are the most awesome you've ever seen, brilliantly colored in the warm black of the night. "Because China invented that shit," you'll say at the dramatic conclusion.

Leaving Rooster Territory

We've left rooster territory. This is not counting the chicken the boys ('the boys will be boys' boys) snuck in past the gate to the courtyard of the girls' dorms. Not counting this chicken, which was smuggled with the accompaniment of loud popping fireworks, we have stopped dwelling with poultry nearby. I imagined the stunt led to at least 3 out of 6 pressed close couples saying goodbyes that got hot and heavy late that muggy night outside the main gate.

A note on this:
We’ve traded bamboo-bungalow hopping for a room with a balcony 5 stories up surrounded by the girls' dorms of the university where Chris, Katie and Michael teach. We have big water heater and a shower like a space ship. We watch the lights switch out automatically in the girls' dorms at 10:30 pm and know that they have no hot water. Clothes and blankets hang outside windows and the students wash their hair over the balconies. We have to call, "Ayiii," just the same as the students to get in past the locked gate at night - but receive no scolding for bad behavior.

Far from rooster territory, at 5:30 am the nation-mandated exercises for students wake us instead of the crowing machismo of birds. Bewildering pop music and undecipherable distorted Chinese blares from speakers hidden except for their diameter of noise. The morning calisthenics are not optional.

Most mornings I sleep through the music. It is impossible, the students say, to complain. There are student monitors in each class. 'Spy' has a different connotation here.

When we were still in bungalow-dwelling rooster territory, I often slept through their 5 am wake up calls. Even roosters get confused, too excited for the sun to rise. I understand in a way. I get out of bed quickly in a blurry morning at the thought of a new day's cup of coffee. Wade through the cacophony of Friday's market that's only a few blocks from here to get a few varieties of delicious mushrooms, a spinach-like green, spring onions, garlic, peppers, eggs and new potatoes to make big omelettes to share. It costs less than two dollars to buy all these ingredients for breakfast for 5 people.

In the beginning of the week Stevo and I took a bus to Shaoguan. We found ourselves in a peninsular city with rainbow neon light trees next to the river and some sobering Chinglish describing the Japanese invasion of the city underneath a very intense visceral sculpture. We found awesome veggie dumplings fried up by an extremely charismatic man in an alley and the best bakery in China. The next day we made our way to Nanhua Si - a Buddhist monastery 1500+ years old. A truly enormous complex, we wandered paths through huge graceful trees and gaped at 1000 year old monks preserved and lacquered up black in full lotus behind glass.
The signs told us that when one of the monks was hacked into during the Cultural Revolution he bled liquid blood. It was the "Tomb-sweeping holiday" and gold paper floated down through the hazy air near a huge incinerator for burning "hell bank notes" and other paper items (in the market today Chris got a paper Nokia cell phone) for ancestors and ghosts.

Back in Ganzhou we were invited to drink tea all afternoon in a friend’s tea shop downtown. I watch the "professor of tea" wash the leaves and splash water around the table in a perfected ceremony and we drink dozens of tiny cups of perfectly brewed te guan yin. The whole crew of us hang out and make friends with John's younger sisters (10 and 14) as well as an extended family that arrives in a police van. Vehicles in this country, after all, are first and foremost for transport.

Siem Reap

The moon rose fiery pink orange last night, an exaggerated color through the layers of dust and haze in Siem Reap. Stevo and I sat on the roof of our guesthouse in the outskirts of town and listened in 360 degrees to the chickens and cows next door, an English lesson sung back in chorus, ("Are you happy?"yes! "Are you sad?" no! "Are you angry?" yes! noyesno yes!) There was a Hindu-sounding amplified chant and I spied on the family below us sitting down for dinner. We could also make out distant karaoke, a soccer game and gamelan drumming.


We landed two weeks ago in sticky-hot, amazing and mad Bangkok around midnight. The next day we dragged our jet-lagged and blistered selves to see breath taking wats, huge golden buddhas and stupas surrounded by dozens of little boys playing ping-pong. Then directly to meet Sarah on Ko Pha Ngan, an island off the coast of southern Thailand for lots of efficient chilling to the backdrop of white sand and perfect turquoise water. We ate green curry and homemade ice cream, rented motorbikes and rode through the deliciously cool soft black morning to the watch the sunrise on the east side of the island. Sarah looked awesome, grinning widely in her big sunglasses and maneuvering her made-in-Thailand Honda "Click."

Back to Bangkok, then Ayuthaya and then all day in motion, a requisite $10 bribe at the confusion and we are in Cambodia. The wildly awful road from the border town of Poipet is lined with some of the most devastatingly impoverished places I've ever seen. We narrowly miss bicyclists with handkerchiefs over their faces, squinting hard against the thick red dust. Then, the sudden opulence of Siem Reap's 5-star hotels.

The Angkor temples are amazing. The last three days we've rented bikes and explored the massive group of complexes. Despite floods of tourists that pour off of buses it is a powerful place and it is possible to find quiet corners. Yesterday we climbed to the top of a 5-tiered pyramid (Phnom Bekeang) and were all alone with the blue sky and awesome view except for a quietly snoring Khmer and the strains of American classic rock on his portable radio. Stevo remembers the names of the temples. So far, I've liked the big heads the best.